


Seven For a Secret

by ofsevenseas



Category: Nobuta wo Produce
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Navel-Gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-23
Updated: 2007-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 09:34:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/52217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofsevenseas/pseuds/ofsevenseas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Shuuji and Akira leave, things return to status quo. Creepy 2nd person POV is creepy, and also fairly obvious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven For a Secret

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Melo!

Uehara Mariko is your average over-achiever pretty girl who does everything right and will probably end up in law school or become a doctor and then marry some boringly successful salaryman. You can see that people love her, every time you see her pass in the hallways and the crowd automatically turns her way, as if drawn by the invisible force of her charm.

And you know that her beauty isn't skin deep.

Right now you're all in English class, going through collections of nursery rhymes, from morbid to innocent to happy to strange, all the things that make you wonder about children and their imaginations.

_One for a boy_

You laugh quietly to yourself as you think back to her face when Shuuji, that idiot, asked her out. It made you want to take a carefully manicured hand and slap it across her cheek, to wake her up. But you told yourself that one idiot deserved another, and left them alone.

_Two for a girl_

You wonder if she realized that girls like her are made to be unhappy, in the same way that they want to be absolutely in love. There's no black and white for the heart, you want to whisper, there's only vermillion red.

_Three for joy_

Nobuta. Nobuko. Nobuta. It was a triptych in ridicule, in hypocrisy, in rainbow coloured shirts and hurt. But three legs are more stable than two, Mariko. Never forget your physics.

_Four for sorrow_

Love triangles are stupid, but love squares are tragic. It's more permanent this way, you see. Three people can support each other, four people, and the power flows are disrupted. You want to tell her, stop, stop, you're going about this wrong, but she's in love.

_Five for silver_

Now that Kiritani and Kusano are gone, you see that she's still drawn, in that way of hers, to the old triumvirate. Three is a magic number, but is it Shuuji she likes best now?

_Six for gold_

You watch her on the roof, sunlight bleaching her hair golden. But Nobuta glows. She'll never surpass that.

_Seven for a secret  
Never to be told_

You want to tell her about the way Bando's bruised eyes look at her through the classroom windows (she broke her arm falling down the stairs last week, could you believe), you want to tell her about Nobuta crying on the roof (but wait, she's already seen that), you want to name all the stars in the heavens after doomed, stupid little girls in love, and you want to tell her about her future. But you don't.

Neither fish or fowl, nor good red herring.

She's just plain beautiful Mariko after all.


End file.
